Summary Of Mary Bernstein's The Marriage Contract

Mary Bernstein’s The Marriage Contract analyzes how marriage has historically been a legal contract strictly for the purposes of procreation and economic gains and that the concept of marriage for love is a relatively new phenomenon. She also examines how marriage is promoted by public policies as a way to rectify social problems. She shows how marital success is portrayed in the image of the ideal traditional family structure with a male husband, female wife, and children with an obvious gendered division of roles. These heteronormative assumptions about appropriate gender roles support this hegemonic view of the family which is then allocated by policymakers in order to lessen attention from the structural causes of social problems (Bernstein:

There were marriage laws in place that regulated people’s sexual lives in order to cater to this traditional familial model by prohibiting any sexual expression that deviated from the goal of monogamy and procreation such as, polygamy, polyamory, or homosexual relations (Bernstein: 422). This traditional ideal of American families has been diminishing, thus leading to more diverse family formations. Even with diversifying familial structures emerging for example, immigrant families, poor families, families of color, different sexual orientations, or consensual non-monogamous relationships; they are still judged and seen as inferior in comparison because they deviate from the ideal family type that is considered universally acceptable. These diversifying attributes are seen as the main source for each group’s social problems and of societal problems and thus, the state promotes heterosexual nuclear families as the norm and promotes marriage as a way to overcome these problems (Bernstein: 424). This view ignores so much diversity in successful relationships and fails to recognize that this ideal is not necessarily normative to other